City Weekend is taking you on a shopping spree. With this week's series, we'll be helping you to pinch those pennies as we guide you through the many ways to bag a bargain in China. Today, we begin with the first lesson in Taobao 101.

I'm going to be honest with you; I'm a taobao virgin. I've shied away from the mammoth website for two reasons. The first being that the website is so utterly confusing I never know where to start. The second is because I'm a little bit afraid of the damage I will do to my savings once I have learned the tricks of the trade.

I have decided to put taobao to the test and join in on all the online shopping fun. Over the next few days I am going to be a City Weekend guinea pig and make my very first taobao purchase. Before I can start shopping, my first mission is to set up an account. I tackled this today. Here's how it went:

I went straight to the registration page. You can make life a whole lot easier and use google translate to translate each page or you can follow my simple screen shots.

After filling in all my details correctly, I was taken to the above page advising me that a confirmation email had been sent to my inbox.

Waiting for me in my inbox was this message asking me to activate my account by clicking on the blue hyperlink.

Success! My account was activated and now I am ready to shop. All that is left to do is to decide what I want to buy.

Check back tomorrow for the next lesson "Taobao Lesson 2: Searching and Selecting an item".